Selfie

Only the dead will notice the difference
Only the buried see the similarity
Between the girls who pose in front of their phones
In the reconstructed Old Town of Kunming
And those whose fingers form the same victory sign
In the bloody ruins of Gaza City.

— Kunming, June 2024

• • • • •

In March 2024 I published an article in Off-Guardian titled ‘Gaza Selfie: Representing the Chosen People’, about the images coming out of the genocide in the Gaza Strip, many of which showed Israeli soldiers posing for photographs in front of Palestinian prisoners who were blindfolded, handcuffed and stripped half-naked. One of these showed a group of ten female soldiers taking a ‘selfie’ against the backdrop of the devastation of Gaza, smiling, laughing and making victory signs. Three months later, as I travelled through South-east China, I was struck that almost every girl I encountered taking a selfie or posing for a friend’s smartphone — and in three weeks I saw hundreds of such scenarios performed with a manic devotion — adopted the same poses before the camera.